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Saturday, April 28, 2012

Say what you will about popular piano arrangements, I credit many of these artists and their work with inspiring young pianists to keep exploring new repertoire and continue playing, when boredom with traditional classical repertoire might have otherwise caused them to quit.

Here's Jarrod Radnich (filmed by the Piano Guys) playing his own arrangement of Klaus Badelt's Pirates of the Caribbean theme. It's worth checking out the sheet music for the arrangement, whose Lisztian virtuosity sounds rather flashy, but isn't as difficult as it looks.

One of my students is performing this arrangement next month, and I'm
glad to say that this arrangement inspired him to work fiendishly hard in order to master some difficult piano writing that would have been beyond his abilities a few months ago.